PHILADELPHIA – When the knee strike landed, Tito Ortiz’s body knew the fight was over even if his mind didn’t.

In the second round of his pay-per-view headliner at UFC 133, a grounded Ortiz (16-9-1 MMA, 15-9-1 UFC) was tagged with a vicious knee to the body from eventual winner Rashad Evans (16-1-1 MMA, 11-1-1 UFC).

The fight-altering blow came after a cat-and-mouse game that – while dangerous – Evans knew would carry him to victory.

Evans, of course, maintained his top-contender status with a second-round TKO of Ortiz. The fight took place at Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Center.

Evans, who initially was slated to fight light-heavyweight champion Jon Jones and then Phil Davis before Ortiz stepped in as a late replacement, wobbled “The Huntington Beach Bad Boy” with punches before the final exchange on the ground. With Ortiz transitioning from grounded to standing positions, Evans knew a potential illegal knee to the head could result in disaster. But he was confident the body blow would find its mark.

“I was especially conscious of it because I knew he was waiting for me to knee him in the head,” Evans told MMAjunkie.com (www.mmajunkie.com) after the event. “The way he stood up, he took one knee up, and then he saw I was going to knee him, and he put another knee down. He said, ‘OK, I’m going to wait for him to knee me.’ For a minute, I was thinking knees so much that I almost forgot to punch him.

“But then I punched him, and he forgot I was going to knee him, and then I kneed him in the body instead of to the head.”

Was there any hesitation? Was he worried about an illegal knee to the head of a grounded opponent?

“I knew by the way I pushed forward it was going right to the body,” he said. “It wasn’t going in an upward motion. It was like leaning right into him.”

Ortiz was well aware of the cat-and-mouse game playing out.

“It was like a chess match,” he said.

Once tagged with the knee, Ortiz visibly tensed up from the pain. The blow landed flush, and Ortiz never recovered. Evans then finished him off with strikes at the 4:48 mark of the second round.

With the victory, Evans now is slated to meet the winner of next month’s title fight between champ (and former training partner) Jones and Quinton “Rampage” Jackson, whom Evans defeated prior to his recent 14-month layoff.

Meanwhile, Ortiz, who staved off retirement with an early-July upset of Ryan Bader, goes back to the drawing board. UFC president Dana White said there are plenty of good fights left for him. So don’t expect the veteran, who took the UFC 133 fight on just a few weeks’ notice, to call it quits anytime soon.

“Rashad was the better fighter tonight,” he said. “He took advantage of it. He showed 14 months really paid off, and you can’t take two-and-a-half weeks to fight a No. 1 contender. Rashad was the better man – the better fighter – tonight.”

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